Homework, Birthdays, and More Homework

Today's been a long, frustrating day filled with forgotten passwords and impossible math. To make a seemingly eternal story short, I stayed after school for an extra hour getting help for a test in AP Calculus BC (I put the whole title because it makes me feel intelligent) that's tomorrow and missed my lunch because of a forgotten login to the laptops in English. Not cool.

But, my grandparents came by to give me my belated birthday gift! It was fun to see them and show off my record collection which has grown substantially since they gave me records from their collection. Speaking of vinyls, Death Cab for Cutie's Plans arrived in the mail today!

What you see before you is $200 worth of music, give or take. And some ugly carpet, but don't worry, I didn't pay for that. And those are only the brand spanking new records. I still have nine or ten older ones, too!

After my grandparents left, my sister and I went over to Sam's house (our Chinese exchange student friend from Hong Kong) to celebrate his 18th birthday. We sprayed the crap out of him with silly string and had a blast. He leaves on his mission in December, and pretty much everyone who knows him is sad to see him go. We love that kid.

Okay, enough procrastination. I must study. I must do good on this test. I must!

I Wanna Get Better

You might be thinking, Kyle, why hast thou forsaken us? It's true, I pretty much have. But not to worry, friends, I have a plan! Mostly it involves more blog posts more often. I've found something interesting about keeping a blog: you find interesting things to do so that you can go home and blog about it. Because I haven't had much time to do anything, let alone be interesting, for the last month, I haven't blogged much. School is crazy, but I think that I've found my routine and will be able to actually do something with my life. I wanna get better!

The title of today's post is taken from a song by Bleachers. I bought the album on vinyl, and I was so excited when I pulled it out of its sleeve for the first time!

It's transparent!

Cool, right? Now I have a pink record, a clear record, a laser etched record, and a bunch of your traditional black records. I love music.

Speaking of music, we got a piano! It was my dad's grandma's and we were able to take it home!

So far I can only play Passenger Seat by Death Cab for Cutie. I'm planning on taking piano lessons, though, so I can play for reals! And, of course, you can find a piano tutorial for basically any song on YouTube. I plan on spending some time learning some fun. and probably some more Death Cab as well!

We're finally going to go and pick up a kitchen table in a bit. We've been eating at the counter where we have no bar stools, so we're pretty happy to finally get a place to sit down and eat like real people do. More normality, here we come!

Birthday Boy

My sister and I in front of the peanut butter bars she made. I do love peanut butter bars!

On Monday I celebrated my 17th birthday. I had a lot of fun spending time with my family. I was given a ton of gift cards to all my favorite things. iTunes, Barnes & Noble, f.y.e., and more! I'm excited to get some new records and music, and maybe some cool nerdy puzzles/games from Barnes & Noble!

 A couple of good friends of mine decorated my room with tons of balloons and streamers. And one of them almost gave me a heart attack by jumping out of the linen closet in the hall to my room. I'd post a picture of what my room looked like, but it was really hard to get a good angle. Besides, it's still a bomb from the move and needs a little TLC. 

Yesterday I thought a lot about what turning 17 actually means. And I decided it means that life is sneaking up on me. I thought that I was prepared to get older and enter adulthood. I'm taking college courses, taking high stakes tests, thinking about my future, exploring careers I might want to try, etc. But I realized that I'm not ready. I make the joke with my family that in a year they're going to let me pick the president. Really, though, in a year a ton of responsibility falls on my shoulders. I'll be my own person. People will start to care about things I do. Mistakes I make will stick to me, not my parents. All this happens in one year! 

Nevertheless, I do love adventures. And becoming an adult is going to be a big one. 

Clean Clothes Are Important

It's hard to go to church when your Sunday clothes are sitting in the bottom of your hamper. And when they have been sitting there since the move. Yeah.

Also, tomorrow's my birthday!

School On Saturday!?

Today was the first day of a six week ACT prep course I am taking at Mountain View. The Course starts at 9 am and goes until 12 pm. Every Saturday. Ughh. Today we took a diagnostic ACT that took the entire three hours. It was dang hard, and I hope that I am way more confident in my abilities by the end of the course.

After I got home I went to Lowe's with my dad to pick up something we needed for our new sink he installed. Then he was kind enough to let me sleep for a couple of hours. My head hurt from all the frantic thinking it had done earlier. I just got back from work at the Owlz. It's been a pretty busy day.

Speaking of busy, there's a really interesting article you should read that my good friend showed to me. It's called 'The Busy Trap' and discusses why society shouldn't be so focused on staying busy. It gives a whole new perspective on work and free time. 

I decided to write a short story. So there. During story boarding and writing the first page, I found out that writing is easy. Writing beautifully, however, is really hard. Hopefully it turns out!

The Clymb

Yes, the 'y' was on purpose.

I have loved theclymb.com for a long time now. It's a website that has different sales that run for three or four days with crazy deals on everything from climbing shoes to surf boards. If you're looking for anything outdoorsy, or some really cool looking shirts like the ones I bought above, the Clymb is the place for you. Go check it out!

What Do I Say?

I'm not even going to apologize for neglecting this blog. And I'll tell you why.

That house that I mentioned we were closing on last post? It's now officially our home. I've found out that a home is a lot of work. You know it's a lot of work when you're happy that you have to go to school instead of stay home and work like your parents do. But we have a home now. Not an apartment. A home! 

Anyway, the house has taken up pretty much all of my family's time. And then there's that school stuff. You know, going to a big crowded building and learning about stuff? There's that, too. But school's not so bad, and a hugely contributing factor to its not-so-badness is that A day B day schedule and university schedule (classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) don't coincide, which means I have a free third period every Tuesday and Thursday. Let's just say that walking to our home every other day and taking a nap while the rest of the world learns stuff is fine by me!

I am actually enjoying school so far. I have a lot of really interesting classes with good people. I think that this year may define my high school experience, that one year that you remember over the others. I've already been exposed to new ways of thinking and new strategies to conquering challenges. I'm optimistic that I will be able to utilize the things that I'm learning and record them to remember later.

That .30-06 I told you about? I'm typing this post on it. Instead of buying the gun I decided to get smart and buy a laptop. I figured if I'm pretending to be a college kid for a couple of classes, I might as well go all out. So I did. I'm loving the computer. Homework is infinitely easier when you can just pull out a computer and do it in the backyard.

Did I mention that we have a backyard? I'm sitting on our patio, listening to the wind rustle through the leaves, the birds chirping on the power lines, and the pleasant sound that my fingers make as they strike the keys on my laptop. Life's not so bad. Not bad at all ...